On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language

Abstract

Barbara Smith's book may be viewed as a contribution to general theory of mimesis, including mimesis but not limited to it. The key to her revision of mimetic theory is notion of adumbrated in her Poetic Ctosure (1968) and developed here in a series of essays ranging from an examination of Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art to a comprehensive review of Roger Fowler's Style and Structure in Literature, in which she demolishes with amusing verve pretensions of the new stylistics. As usual, Smith's work is well informed, elegant, and remarkably lucid. Fictive discourse, as defined by Smith, imitates or represents not battles, quests, trials of adolescence, or even the life of mind, as traditional mimetic theory suggests, but rather discowurse. Fictive discourse is a simulacrum of discourse, latter including utterances ... that can be taken as someone's saying something, somewhere, sometime, that is, as verbal acts of real persons on particular occasions in response to particular sets of circumstances (p. 15). A novel-for example, Tom Jones-thus represents not adventures of its eponymous hero but rather a biography of a real person with that name. Similarly, David Copperfield represents a natural autobiographical narrative, while lyric poetry typically represents not a written artifact but a spoken utterance: a lover's complaint to his mistress, or a reflective man's verbal response to view of Dover beach, sea, and French coast light on a particular moonlit evening. Whereas discourse is by definition assumed to have occurred in a particular historical context which determines its meaning, fictive discourse is assumed not to have occurred at all and in that sense its meaning is not context-dependent in same way. This view has important implications for literary criticism and theory. Smith proposes to abandon search for a formal distinction between literature and nonliterature (or literary and nonliterary language) in favor of a functional distinction between ways of taking or construing utterances or texts. The latter distinction cuts across that between literature and nonliterature (since fictive discourse may include kinds of discourse not considered literary: logicians' examples, proverbs, quotations, etc.) and thus offers a new way of conceiving relation between different kinds of discourse. Since fictive discourse is not taken to have been really said on a particular occasion by someone who meant what he said, it is a mistake not only to assume that it is author's discourse but also to assume that it is historically determined at all in usual sense. In case of Hamlet, for example, the composition of play... was a historically determinate event, but events represented in play are historically indeterminate. This means, among other things, that when we ask why Hamlet abuses Ophelia in nunnery scene, we do not expect to find answer in any historical particulars of life of William